


there are miles to go before I can sleep, though my first steps were taken so long ago

by MatildaSwan



Series: when worlds collide in parallel times [1]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Childbirth, F/F, F/M, Gordon breaks his arm is that's a squick for anyone, Kate Stewart Appreciation Week, Kate is a big science nerd and loves plants, Lesbian Realisations, Living on a houseboat w a toddler bc Kate is a stubborn lil bean, Multi, Sexual Content, compulsory heterosexuality, references to the Brig and Gordon's father, she also has a massive crush on her 10th grade teacher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 09:47:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,731
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12702348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MatildaSwan/pseuds/MatildaSwan
Summary: 'Science leads,' her father had said. Kate had listened and let it guide her. Though the path she took never looked quite the way she thought it would, it got her where she wanted to go, so for that, there's very little of her life she'd change.





	there are miles to go before I can sleep, though my first steps were taken so long ago

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Kate takes a while to realise she's a lesbian bc heteronormativity is the pits. That time involves her having a baby. Also, stuffy old dudes being yikes about women in STEM and also single mothers.
> 
> Part of the Kate/Serena Tales from AAUnit!verse, and big shoutout to Jess for being my beta, ur a babe <3

‘Science leads,’ her father had said, one rare evening when he was home before halfway through dinner, with a book about the stars clutched in his hand. He’d fetched it when Kate asked how the moon hung in the sky and placed it in Kate’s eager, waiting hands before bundling them both into his lap. He’d done his best to explain with Kate balanced on his knee, one arm around her middle holding her steady, leaving the other hand free to point at the pictures.

‘I have a friend who could do all this better,’ he’d mused as they closed the book, Fiona calling them to the table. ‘Maybe one day you’ll meet him.’

It was something he repeated, time and again, whenever he was there, whenever he was home, whenever he could. Always solemn and serious so she’d never forget: ‘No matter the danger, science always leads.’

She never understood what danger he might be talking about, when all he ever did was sit behind a desk all day, away from her and her mother until he left for good, but she listened to his words and they stayed with her for years to come

*

Not that it meant much growing up. It was, after all, just another piece of advice her father imparted like ‘don’t talk to strangers’ or ‘double knot your runners’ or ‘make sure the safety is on’; just another thing he liked to say before he stopped saying anything to her at all.

It didn’t help that school managed to make science so boring: she wasn’t particularly interested in being led anywhere by bland, boring monotone men who spent her first years in high school banging on about plants like they were more interesting in textbooks than they were living and breathing in the outside world.

But with her tenth grade teacher standing perfect and poised at the front of the class in black kitten heels and an immaculate white lab coat, with shining brunette curls gathered high on her head in a braided bun, it seems to take on new meaning.

It’s silly really, in hindsight, how it took her so long to realise just where that meaning came from, why it mattered so much that Ms Hill liked her, how else that might have looked given another circumstance, but at the time it just makes Kate work hard, harder than she’s ever bothered before, to entice her teacher to move from the front of class and stand behind Kate to read answers over her shoulder and wait for Kate to turn before nodding with a smile and muttering ‘good work’ and walk away while Kate flushed with pride.

It’s hard, at first, to put so much effort into studying—so used being brighter than most and never having to try to make things just good enough to be done—but it paid off in spades, across the whole board, but none as high as year 10 science. And when her term project on germination variance in orchards comes back with the highest mark of the class and Ms Hill pulls her aside after class to beams at Kate and utters praise, she feels prouder than she did when she won three gold stars in the art show when she was eight, so proud that she worries she might burst.

It spurs her on come time to chose her final classes; she digs in her heels when everyone glazes over sciences to try and steer her towards humanities.

‘Women don’t belong in STEM,’ her 8th grade teacher, still as bland and bald and boring as ever, had the gall to say outright on Parent’s Night. ‘There’s no room for them in hard sciences.’

Kate had sneered; he’d fallen silent. She’d stared daggers at him while her mother politely asked for a report on Kate’s progress this year and hadn’t said another word until he’d realised Kate had come near the top for the whole year.

‘Thank you,’ she’d spat, saccharine sweet and still sneering, when he finally passed over the GCSE science info sheets she’d asked for when they sat down. ‘I look forward to seeing you next year.’

And when she’d walked into her first year eleven biology class to see not a balding shine waiting behind the teacher’s desk as she’d feared, but rather, as she’d hoped, to find Ms Hill leaning back against the edge of her desk with the same white coat and tiny, bright smile that grows exponentially as she watches Kate take her seat, Kate thinks she’d be happy to lead herself along this path forever.

*

She’s still not quite sure how Gordon came about.

She was there, of course, she knows _that_ much, at least; is well aware that a belly full of wine after a term full of stress and a momentary lapse in logic left her naked and writhing on her back with a boy she barely knew between her legs.

It was nice enough, she remembers, with her eyes closed tight and two fingers sunk knuckle deep inside, and when he’d pulled away and left her wanting to roll latex over his cock before pressing a blunt head against her core she hadn’t any objections, too distracted by the hum of her body and the heat in her belly and the beautiful, bright laugher replaying in her ears as her mind wandered away to wonder where the woman she met in the kitchen—brunette curls and bright, dark eyes and ruby red lips—might have got to after Kate’s friend interrupted their conversation to pull Kate away from the kitchen bench and the brunette’s company, and into the living room and the seat beside the bloke who up ended up inside her in his best mate’s bed (because that’s what people do, to cut loose, wasn’t it? It’s what she’s supposed to want, how she’s supposed to behave, she was sure she’d been told).

She understands the mechanics, of course, has a reasonably good grasp of reproduction, for all plants are her speciality where as humans, not so much. She knows that contraceptives do fail, that condoms can break; she hadn’t known that latex wears when left in a wallet for weeks on end till after the fact: that possibility hadn’t occurred to her at the time, but in the time since—in between morning sickness and classes and judgemental stares before, during, and after exams—she’s realised it’s the most likely.

She knows what went in to getting her here, caked in sweat and swearing at the ceiling, contractions ripping through her body with her knees spread apart while she tears herself apart to push a baby out of her womb and into the world.

She’s a scientist, or at least she will be one day—for all having a baby before her 20th birthday wasn’t part of her plan—and she knows the how of what’s happening.

She’s just not sure she believes it.

Still doesn’t believe it, really, until she holds her just born baby in her arms, wrapped tight and snug and so pink and only sniffling a little, now he’s not screaming or covered in blood.

‘Hello, you,’ she croons softly, exhausted and teary and torn. ‘I’ve been waiting to meet you, I’m Kate, your mother.’

He looks up her with steel grey eyes that have the whole universe to see and she thinks of the man who first taught her about the stars.

‘And you’re Gordon,’ she whispers, kissing his forehead. ‘And I’m so glad you’re here.’

This mightn’t have been part of her plan, but she loves him just the same.

*****

University is one thing. University with a child is another thing entirely.

At first she’s glad for the time away, for the chance to grow as she watched Gordy do the same. But getting back into good habits is hard after all that time, harder so with a toddler on a houseboat (she probably should have stayed in the house with her mother when she went back to study, but the house had gotten too stifling, the tension between mother and daughter—now both adult and grown—had gotten too much. So when she’d walked along the channel one afternoon with Gordon napping in his pram and promptly fallen in love with the boat she now calls home, she’d been too stubborn to admit it was probably all a terrible idea, no matter what her mother had said), but come the end of her first semester back she’s managing well enough and even better than expected; well enough, even, to give dating a go.

She’s happy on her own, with Gordy, but she likes the closeness from time to time, being near another warm body who won’t cover in her sick or cry all over her shoulder (well, tears do happen sometimes, on either side, and she’s realised its just one of those things that can’t be helped and can actually help, to let all of it flow free to let it go). She appreciates the chance to find herself with her face buried in the crux of a pretty brunette’s thighs, now she’s figured out this part of herself, and her mother is always happy to have Gordon for the night, happier still when Kate just comes over for dinner.

She manages it all just fine for a few semesters. Then Gordon breaks his arm.

They’re in the park, Gordon off by the swings with his friend Jemima while her mother pushes the two of them. Kate sits on the bench enjoying the sunshine peeking out behind clouds to catch the last of the midday shower and shine a rainbow in the sky nearby drops, enjoying the time away from studying and watching her son enjoy himself. Till he jumps off the swing and trips over his laces—she could swear she double knotted them—and topples over before she has a chance to get up off her seat.

He goes from a giggling child to a sobbing mess in the seven seconds it takes her to run to his side, and she can’t say she blames him when she see the state of his arm—she can’t see the splinted bone but she’s certain it’s there all the same—and the scraping of woodchips on his chin and cheek and palms.

She can barely breathe on the way to hospital. She’s certain she broke no fewer than seven traffic regulations to get there in the time she did.

The triage nurse is efficient—unperturbed but kind about a wailing child in so much pain (it is her job, after all, Kate realises some time later, when she’s caught her breath and remember how think again, to see this kind of thing every day), but clearly a little disturbed by the frantic, frightened mother so intent on refusing to panic it leaves her shaking with the force of it all—and for all Kate would class that afternoon as simultaneously the best and worst afternoon of her life in the years to come, the entire experience isn’t the most horrible thing she’d ever had to endure nor the longest, for all it seems to drag on for eternity.

She’s waiting beside Gordon’s bed while they wait for scans when a cup of coffee is pressed, slowly but firmly, into her hand. Kate blinks at the cup, clenches her fingers to hold it; finds the wherewithal to look up and sees a pretty brunette around Kate’s age kindly down at her.

‘You look like you could use it,’ the scrub clad doctor urges, nodding her chin towards the cup cradled in Kate’s hand.

Kate grunts. She still hadn’t quite remember how inhabit a corporeal form. That doesn’t seem to phase the other woman. 

‘Is there anyone we can call?’

Kate hums, shaking her head, looking away and trying to focus.

‘No, my mother’s out of town.’ She takes a sip of coffee and tries to focus on the warmth of the liquid rather than the taste on her tongue. ‘So’s dad,’ she adds absently, still not used to idea that he might be around at all, despite the months since he came back into her life.

‘What about his?’ she asks, pointing to Gordon now dosing in his bed.  

‘Oh, no,’ Kate replies, shaking her head again as she looks her son. ‘He’s not in the picture.’

‘I see.’ She sniffs. Kate bristles. She wonders why this woman looks so familiar as she braces herself for the judgement and disgust she’s grown used to hearing whenever a stranger finds out she’s a single mother with a bastard child, as if that means anything in this day and age. ‘His idea or yours?’

Kate blinks at the query, her tone so different from what she’s grown used to and learnt how to ignore, instead full of genuine interest. She’s sure it’s mainly curiosity, senses this woman isn’t disinterested in the occasional piece of gossip, but she’s also sure there’s more than a hint of care there too. It’s nothing she expected and it throws her.

She stammers slightly, caught between the unfamiliar sensation of wanting to open up and talk about herself, and the lingering need to defend Marcus in his absences, to be fair about the whole situation which wasn’t his fault, nor hers, and just something that happened. Because she knows he might have stayed, for Gordy’s sake at least, if she’d been kinder; but he’d prattled on about doing the right thing before asking her to marry him when all she’d wanted was to be left alone.

‘I don’t want you,’ she’d said, choking on bile and realising why the idea of spending her life with a man was more terrifying than growing another human inside her. ‘I never did.’

He hadn’t known what to do with that, so he’d left her alone, just like she’d asked.

‘Both,’ Kate answers, finally, carefully, not knowing what else to add.

‘Well, that’s something then’ the doctor says, not unkindly, and leaves them to it.

Kate doesn’t see her again, till they’re preparing to discharge Gordon—a cast on his arm already sporting a tiny cartoon dog he’d made Kate draw while they wait and a list of care instructions for them both—standing beside the Consultant and listening with keen interest as they go over charts two beds down. Only then does Kate realise she never said thank you, or even asked her name.

It unsettles her, to think she’d been in such a daze before she couldn’t even ask one simple question of someone who’d been kind for no other reason than she wanted to, and when the Consultant moves from one bed to the next with a gaggle of junior doctors on his tail, she flags her down.

‘Sorry, I know you’re busy,’ Kate preempts the frown on her face. ‘I wanted to thank you, for before, and apologise for not thanking you then.’

‘Perfectly understandable,’ she says, frown easing as she smiles, soft and warm. ‘It can’t have been an easy day for you.’

‘No, not at all,’ Kate breaths out with a heavy sigh. She sees the other woman’s attention flicker towards the group she’s supposed to be with and knows she ought to say goodbye; what she says instead is: ‘But I expect you see this kind of thing every day?’

‘A woman as gorgeous as you handling a crisis on her own with no one coming to keep her company?’ the brunette quips offhandedly, her attention clearly split in favour of the movement of the ward rounds. ‘No, not really.’

An instant later the other woman snaps back to Kate, her eyes widen with horror as she realises exactly what she’s just said. She opens her mouth with the beginnings of a stammered apology and Kate cuts her off.

‘I think a compliment like that deserves a drink, don’t you? Can I buy you coffee sometime, when you’re not at work?’

The relief runs through her body so visibly it makes Kate’s heart ache; the spark in her eye makes Kate’s skin tingle.

‘I’d be delighted,’ she promises, plucking the info sheet out of Kate’s hand and grabbing a nearby pen to scrawl her name and number at the top. She hands it back with a smile that leaves Kate’s heart racing to fast she thinks it might beat right out her chest.

The sheet stays by her bedside table and she grows used to seeing ‘Serena’ etched in elegant swirls first thing in the morning and the last thing at night; grows used to seeing it on Gordon’s cast too, after the woman herself signs it not three weeks later, before all three of them take an afternoon trip to get ice cream.

The name stays there till the cast comes off; she stays far, far longer.

*****

Falling in love when she ought to be writing a dissertation was definitely not part of the plan, but she hardly minds, all things considered. It’s a bit of a distraction, she knows, but the prospect of stealing kisses over notes whenever they spend the evening studying together is delightful, not the mention all the chances she now has to trace tongue and fingertip over hot, soft skin and make Serena quake and shiver in her arms, or the mornings they wake up together with pillow lines on their faces to wipe crusted sleep away from their eyes and greet each other with gentle kisses and wandering hands before reluctantly rising and getting on their days.  

Her focus may be split in more ways than before, but it isn’t splintered enough for her to lose track of anything. She simply refuses to fall behind, if only out of spite to prove her supervisor wrong.

They make sense in theory, their specialties the same, but they clash worst than cats and dogs in the middle of the thunderstorm. She knows he disapproves her having a child with no ring on her finger or even someone waiting for her at home—little does he know—but this his problem, not hers; her problem with him is being held to a standard he can only reach because he’s spent his life learning how, while she has so much of her life and learning left to go. They’re unreasonable and she hates him for it, hates bullies in authority and loses all patience for men who need to prove their importance when they’re already in positions of power. She has little respect for men who need to demand it with words, rather than earn it with deeds, but it spurs her on, the need to prove him wrong, to met those standards and reach even higher, and she does.

She graduates with the highest of honours and the sweetest of graduate program to pick from and set off across the country for the chance to build a home with her son and Serena by her side.

*****

She’d expected grad school to be hard. It isn’t.

It’s time consuming, taxing, frustrating, a drain on her mind and her body, but it’s not _hard._ It’s not outside of her abilities as they are, and she knows she has what she needs to put the effort in, knows she’ll only get better with time and effort. She certainly has more time, with Gordy at school and settling into at least half a dozen different extra curricular activities that keep him away from home till dinner time, with Serena working long hours and away for so long it seems as if the house is empty all the time.

She isn’t sure why she dislikes the still of it all so much, but doesn’t let herself dwell on it; just fills her time with researching and writing and conversations with their mischief of mice while she's doing housework, and spends as much time outside getting the garden into shape as possible.

She enjoys her research, likes having a goal, a direction to go, even if she’s not quite figured out the specifics of where she’d like it to lead as she goes forward.  

Not quite sure, that is, till the midway point is passed and she’s staring down the home stretch and her supervisor insists she join him at a conference in Geneva.

The weekend is fascinating, though not entirely relevant to her area of expertise, and she’s glad of the practice to rub shoulders and network, to be reminded of just how eloquent she can be when she wants, how easily she can navigate these occasions. Sometimes she wonders if she ought to have gotten into politics, diplomacy, if she hadn’t placed her faith in science so long ago, but she is content enough with the choices she’s made that got her here, and happier still, when she finally twigs to why her supervisor had been so keen, so insistent, on her being here.

‘There you are!’ he says once he’s tracked her down by the canapes. ‘Come with me,’ he adds, with hand on her elbow and already guiding her towards the corner of the room. ‘I’ve got someone for you to meet.’

They come to a stop in front of a man a uniform just like her father’s and the same expression he used to wear and she knows, even before he opens his mouth to introduce himself, exactly what he’s doing to say.

She’s still delighted to hear he knew her father well, many years ago, and that he has an offer to extend to her now.

’Are you interested in hearing more, Miss Lethbridge-Stewart?’ He asks, standing ramrod straight even at ease, after a lifetime of standing to attention.

‘It’s Ms Stewart, actually.’ She draws her chin to stand tall, a touch defiant, and keeps her hands in her pockets just because she can. ‘And you know I am.’

*

And when she walks into the Tower thirteen months later with her father’s words ringing loud in her ears along with the click of her heels echoing off the stonework floor beneath her feet as she makes her way from the main entrance to the science wing and flanked by two soldiers for guides that she barely needs to settle into her new lab, she knows this path she’s let herself be led along has only just begun.


End file.
